Fair enough, I agree with most of the things you said. The one I got is made of aluminum and doesn’t feel cheap/thin at all, I guess they have both cheap and “professional” options. Personally I wasn’t looking for something really unique, just for something that had a decent performance for a laptop and works well with Linux. I searched around and this model ticked all my most important boxes.

I don’t know whether Clevo engineers throught about Linux when they designed the device or not, but I can say after configuring it properly, it works without any flaws.

As for buying straight from China, I consider the idea, but at the time I didn’t find a way to buy it for cheaper than buying from a reseller. I’m in Europe, perhaps in the US or in Asia it would be different.

What is it that you don’t like about Clevo chassis? I bought one a few years ago and I love it. It’s elegant and sturdy in my opinion. It’s also easily serviceable, so what’s to complain about it?

That’s very likely the case, but I’d say it makes little difference: any self-hosted application supporting web technology is also a desktop application.

I’ve never had the chance to work with the RAW format, but I think Photoprism should handle it transparently. Depending on your area of knowledge, the setup might feel a bit convoluted though.

Ah right, that makes sense. Today I learned.

For what it’s worth, I always prefer being redundant if it makes the meaning clearer to a non-native speaker audience.

For instance I didn’t know “pandemic” implicitly meant “global”. In my ignorance I thought you could have a localized pandemic. But by saying “global pandemic” it makes it more obvious to everyone, including those who, like me, didn’t know.

Also I’ll personally keep saying “my phone had an LCD display” because it feels smoother than “my phone has a LCD”.

So… this is going to be a debloated lightweight distro (or just a DE?) with official support for not-so-fresh hardware? I don’t fully understand.

Yes, you can develop in .NET on VSCode and the debugger works on Linux too.

There is a Docker version of SQL Server which funnily enough is equivalent to the enterprise version (rather than limited like SQL Express). You can use it for free as long as it’s for development purposes only.

There is no SQL Management Studio though.

One option would be to use PostgreSQL instead. Entity Framework makes it almost free to replace the database anyways (unless you are doing some db-specific things).

There are some other minor annoyances or missing features, it might bother you; but depending on how you are used to work, you might not even notice. But, hey! you are on Linux now, you get all the benefits of a UNIX operating system, it will be worth it for sure, right? (Yes, imho)

As for gaming, I only do light gaming so I probably don’t count. I use Heroic Launcher and it works wonderfully out of the box 50% of the time, the remaining 50% you can probably make it work as good as on Windows if you are persistent enough.

Oh, and sometimes some games run better on Linux than on Windows, but I would say most of the time they run a bit worse.

I work as a professional developer in .NET on Windows, and in my free time I develop in .NET on Linux as a hobby.

Unfortunately I would say the .NET development experience on Linux (with VSCode) is slightly inferior compared to on Windows (with Visual Studio).

For instance there is no support for SourceLink during development, only during debug. And on VSCode the “go to definition” to third party assemblies works only for one level deep, whilst on Visual Studio it works for any depth level.

It is certainly still a great experience on Linux, but not «better than Windows» in my opinion. If you have any recommendations to improve it please share, I would be very grateful.

As an Italian, I would say that’s not the case, not “a lot of Italians are racist”. I’ve had interactions with a few racist people of older generations, but I would say that they are the exception, thankfully.